This is a cancer and leukemia related comic. Two characters are having a discussion about a new trial in cancer treatment. A trial is done to test a proposed treatment on a select group of patients before approval for the wider patent group.

In this case, the two characters are talking about a trial in which immune cells are taken out of the patient's body and genetically modified. The modified cells are able to both attack the cancer cells and to replicate very quickly. However, to make these genetic changes inside the cells, they used HIV as the vehicle to introduce these new genes as it is specialized in invading and modifying immune cells.

Basically, this treatment seems to replace one terrible disease with another terrible disease. As the title text says, they don't know how to get rid of the modified T-cells after they remove the cancer. And the last part of the title text is a joke, in which the doctor suggests yet another disease to inject into the patients body.

The treatment described remains experimental, controversial, highly expensive (because it requires customized set of alterations for each individual cancer), and has had some promising results along with some mixed effects: see this summary in science magazine.

Friend: Helping the immune system attack tumors has been a longtime research target.

Friend: Lots of promising leads. Often they don't pan out.

Cueball: What'd these guys do?

Friend: They took some of the patient's T-cells and patched their genes so they'd attack the cancer. That hasn't been enough in the past but their patch also added code to get the T-cells to replicate wildly and persist in the body.

Cueball: Which worked, but created its own set of problems?

Friend: How'd you guess? But I think the craziest part is the way they insert the patched genes.

Discussion

Does anyone have a link to the actual article? Or possibly a proper citation? 192.17.144.82 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I have added such a link in the explanation. Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to the magazine asterisked in the comic, so the link goes to another one. It also helps to Google "nejm aug 10 2011". Anonymous 04:51, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Trial appears to have been a success, although the patient now has no B-cells and thus a compromised immune system (will need regular gamma globulin transfusions and the like). 75.103.23.206 16:54, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Looks to be this article here [1] and [2]. I'll stick with chemo, thanks. 173.245.54.87 16:36, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

I know it's a joke, but just in case people are taking this seriously, this is worth a read. [3] The key word should have been "lentivirus", not "HIV". The T cells were modified using a heavily altered lentivirus derived from HIV. The virus shouldn't be referred to as HIV, though it makes for some great headlines. 199.27.128.167 20:40, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Before WWII there was an succesful method of curing syphilis with malaria (malariotherapy). Maybe a reference141.101.96.217 11:32, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. I had heard a "story" some time ago that disease brought to higher latitudes from newly discovered tropical countries laid waste to myriads due to the fact that the climate was cooler. Maybe it was related to the lack of suitable pathogens in the communities.

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